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Setting up a B2B e-commerce website can be a lucrative aspect of your business. It can also be an unmitigated disaster if you don't set up the site correctly. All too often, companies make mistakes that make their websites unnecessarily cumbersome or not useful to their audience. As a result, they waste time and money, and miss out on valuable marketing potential and brand-building potential.

By avoiding the most common and destructive mistakes, though, your B2B website can be useful to potential partners and customers. If you are in the process of developing a new site for your small business, or your existing site isn't performing to your expectations, consider whether any of these issues could be the culprit.

Inadequate Hosting

If you are spending money on Web design and development, why would you cut corners on hosting? Yet so many businesses do, settling for hosting service that doesn't present their business in the best light. The foundation of an effective website is hosting with an e-commerce solution that understands the unique demands of an e-commerce site and doesn't suffer from slow loading times, outages, and other issues that can plague hosting services.

If nothing else, keep in mind that free†or low-cost services often keep their rates low through advertising — and you may not always have control over the advertisements that appear on your site. The damage that inappropriate or misaligned advertising can do to your brand cannot be understated.

Poor Navigation

Visitors to your site want to know who you are and what you do right away — studies show that users expect to see that information within 10 seconds of landing on your site. If they can't find it easily, they are likely to get frustrated and leave. Navigation needs to be intuitive, requiring no more than two to three clicks for users to find what they are l...